MAP BioPharma

Ireland’s biggest maternity hospital will go-live with Cerner next month, as part of an upgrade that will see all its maternity units switch to the electronic health record (EHR) system. Cork University Maternity hospital will deploy Cerner on the weekend of 3rd December.

This will eventually be rolled out to a further 18 maternity hospitals that will share a single nationwide Cerner maternal and newborn clinical management system. eHealth Ireland chief executive Richard Corbridge said that Cerner had rebuilt and validated the system specifically for Ireland’s maternity context. “This will be a single instance across 19 hospitals to promote the sharing of information,” he said. It is the first in a series national EHR projects planned in Ireland that will also create a separate single national EHR for specialist oncology hospitals and another for acute hospitals, providing funding is approved.

Cerner has also won a contract to provide the digital national laboratories information platform in Ireland, which is scheduled for roll-out at the first three sites in the second quarter of 2017. These moves are part of a broader eHealth Ireland strategy to digitally transform a national health service that is still largely run on paper.